I had arrived on Earth after the battle of Demon’s Run in which I had initially believed myself to have died in glory and, in so doing, repaid my debt to the Doctor. Unfortunately I had discovered that my injuries actually amounted to a temporary loss of consciousness (or ‘fainting’ as the Hu-man boy Jenny had dared to call it). Accepting the invitation to join the lizard woman and her companion on an entirely temporary basis as I have said, I was not at all prepared for the strangeness of their world. This was a place called Eng-land, ruled over by a wo-man or Queen who was a very good height (my height) and adopted a dark uniform (though she was only ever to be seen being dragged along in a cart by horse-things, waving her claw, or on small pieces of adhesive paper which the Hu-mans wet with their tongues and stuck onto other pieces of paper that they put into red boxes on street corners). The inhabitants of Eng-land spent all day rushing back and forth in a great tide of dark costumes usually holding devices over their heads to shield them against the precipitation which is the main weather system of Eng-land. They seemed to give little thought to the Glory of War, except during conversations in their ‘hostelries’, when they were all for it, chattering at great length from their mouth-holes about ‘sticking it to the Prussians’ or ‘getting one over Fritz’. I was privy to these vital pieces of military tactics whilst working undercover as a cellar man during the Adventure of the Surgeon’s Elbow – one of the earliest cases in which I aided Madam Vastra and Jenny Flint. They were, it turned out, what was known as ‘detectives’. And they spent their time attempting to solve riddles and locking up a series of Hu-mans who had misbehaved. It was explained to me at some length that something called ‘due process’ must be followed and that I couldn’t just slaughter these miscreants and then feed them into my nourishment cluster to be boiled down into food.

Spoilsports.

One day, whilst I was cleansing food waste from the china dishes we use in the house or calculating various stratagems for the Glorification of the Sontaran Race, I forget which, I came across a small box of gelatinous pinkish stuff dusted with fine white powder. For a moment, I took it for a Rutan incursion and was about to blast its filthy worthlessness into the Seven Galaxies when I suddenly realised it was food. I examined the small round box and on it were words:

‘Turkish Delight’

With some trepidation, I picked up a piece of the strange substance and gobbled it up.

Unknown sensations prickled all over my pink tongue and I found that I was – for the first time since my hatching – licking my lips. This was good.